Monday, July 6, 2009

Revisionista: Goals for July 6-12

My reward hasn't arrived in the mail yet, but as soon as I get the candles, I'll post a pic. I've really been enjoying the photos of everyone else's rewards. :)

So, it's another week and a new month. I think after the weekend away, I've lost some steam. I didn't feel like doing anything today, so instead of berating myself for lack of motivation, I just went with the flow and gave myself a day off. I think the funk, malaise, or whatever it was is lifting so I'm hoping that tomorrow I can dive back into my writing with some enthusiasm.

I think Kiki posed a question about rewards in one of her recent posts & whether we should reward ourselves for doing our jobs. I say, yes, yes, yes! Facing the blank page is hard and sometimes the effort is invisible. It can take so long to get to the end of a draft and even longer to get to a defense manuscript, published article/book, etc that I like knowing that there's an immediate treat since the ultimate reward of seeing something in print takes forevah! That said, I must make a vow to stop shopping online between writing sessions. This is v. v. bad! ;)

This Week

Continue morning pages each day.

Freewrite 10 singlespaced pp of CH 1 of the academic book (finish writing about 1st novel of section)

Draft 20 handwritten, wild, messy pages of the NOLA novel

Type novel so far

Read Cailtin Macy's Spoiled

Start Edwige Danticat's Farming of Bones

Blog post on novel writing process

REWARD: take the novel out for a a guiltfree morning writing (maybe Sunday morning)

4 comments:

Hey, Revisionista! Glad you had a nice weekend. Can't wait to see your candles' pic. They are raising great expectations, I think!

All writers (especially SWIMMERS!) need a complete day off. I call it part of the process. It's annoying because we seem to measure our success with the final (or in-between) products, but sometimes for everything to come together we need those apparently useless days where we can't focus, where we write rubbish or where we don't write at all! Congratulations on just accepting that fact and give yourself the day off without beating yourself up! (I should learn from you...)

I know what you mean about Internet shopping... That needs to stop!!!! (I'm talking to myself)

Tell me if I didn't get it right, is your reward to allow yourself guiltfree time to write the novel? Great thinking! At first I tought, hey, this is not a reward but more work! But, thinking about it, I think it's a genius idea. I have so much of the academic stuff to write that when I'm writing my novel I sort of feel guilty about it. I'm constantly thinking 'I should be writing that article' 'I still haven't finished the design of that module...' Other things get in the way aswell (housework, etc) Yeah! I think it's a great reward.

Great goals this week, and a great reward. But Vienna makes a good point about your reward being "guiltfree" novel writing time. Make sure that your uninterrupted novel writing is, in fact, a reward rather than a priority that has been pushed off into the small spaces in between the larger items. Academic guilt...now there's a post topic...